Cool, we’re at the heart chakra.
(Actually, an edit:)
Warm / Hot, we’re at the heart chakra.
It turns out I’m not that much of a “cool” girl. What can I say?
So. Anyhow.
The fourth chakra, the heart chakra, is represented by the color green and is all about love, compassion, and forgiveness. The heart chakra is the midpoint between the lower triangle (root chakra, sacral chakra, and solar plexus chakra) and the upper triangle (throat chakra, third eye chakra, and crown chakra).
This chakra is a bridge, allowing us to communicate between our reality of being incarnated here in 3D bodies with our experiences of family, sex, security, and creativity with all of the ephemeral powers in the upper three chakras around expression, intuition, and connection with the bigger picture.
It’s the heart, so we’re going to talk about love. So much of what I’m learning from all the spiritual practices that are entering into my life is that love is all that’s real. We can experience love and we can experience fear. And fear is simply a call for love. That’s what A Course In Miracles teaches at it’s core.
An enormous component of heart chakra work is forgiveness. Being in unforgiveness is drinking poison and hoping someone else drops dead. I don’t want that. I want my heart and my life to be filled with love, forgiveness, and possibility. I want to be the change I wish to see in the world. I want to see other people living in harmony with one another. The only jurisdiction I have in seeing that vision manifest is by taking action within myself. Working with the heart chakra reminds me that heaven, peace, and love begins within the individual.
When the heart chakra is healthy and in aligned communion with the rest of our chakras, we get to show love to ourselves and to other people. Our blood literally pumps through the organ of the heart to be cleansed, anew again and again, providing us with our literal life force. Place your hand on your chest for a moment now and feel your pulse. Your heart is beating without any help from you, with the divine intelligence of life. We all have that. This commonality has the power to humble and equalize us. Agree?
You are living in a body — and let’s be real, a body is a pretty standard response to the dress code for the human Earth party — so you have a heart that is beating. It’s probably time to pay this energy center some attention.
Try out these suggestions for working with your heart chakra and watch your life change.
HOLD YOUR OWN HEART – Try it now. Put your hand on your heart as you read this post. I’m doing that now too. So much emotion is physically felt in the heart area of the body. When I have felt broken hearted, I have experienced literal, physical pain in my chest. When I have felt overwhelmed with love, joy, and acceptance hanging out with babies, or a friend or family member who I know just loves me unconditionally, or times when I’ve really been able to show up and be useful and of service to other people, I feel the feeling smack dab in the middle of my chest. A quickening of my heart. A deepening. An aliveness.
Putting my hand on my heart feels so good in those moments of pain and pleasure — so validating, so witnessing, so present. I put my hand on my heart right before bed at night and it’s the first thing I do when I wake up. Every darn day. For years. So good. So yes.
DRINK GREEN JUICE & GREEN SMOOTHIES – This is a time to eat a lot of green veggies and get into drinking green drinks. Drink one every day if you can. If you’re new to green drinks, find a great store that makes awesome green juice or, even better, make your own. I highly recommend these books:
Crazy Sexy Juice by Kris Carr
Simple Green Smoothies by Jen Hansard and Jadah Sellner
I use a KitchenAid blender
. I’ve had this model for a number of years and it’s been worth every penny I spent. Here is one of my favorite recipes, adapted from the Simple Green Smoothies crew. I’m drinking this right now while editing this post.
Make a 16oz Peaches & Cream green smoothie
2 oranges (peeled and de-seeded)
1/3 of a can of coconut milk
1 cup of spinach (an overflowing fistful will do)
5oz of frozen peaches (experiment with the amount)
LISTEN TO HEART CHAKRA MUSIC – Make your own playlist of heart centering songs or borrow mine. I feel love and happiness sweeping in all around me when I listen to my heart chakra playlist. I’ll press play on this one when I want to love myself and love you and feel the potential of all the love in the universe swirling around me.
I know I’m waxing poetic here — that’s how high this playlist can get me. I listen to this heart chakra playlist when I wanna dance, sing, and chill. Sometimes I’ll walk a couple of miles across the city singing out loud to this playlist, smiling and feeling great about life.
VISION BOARD TO YOUR HEART’S CONTENT – I had a very yummy and pleasant experience making my own heart chakra Pinterest board. Remember, you can do this with magazines, scissors, and a glue stick or you can go digital with Photoshop or Pinterest. Just do something! What do you want to call into your life around love, forgiveness, heart-centerdered balance, passion, and generative life force?
LITERALLY LEAD WITH YOUR HEART – Squish your shoulders up to your ears, let your shoulders roll down your back, and stick your chest out. With straight, strong posture, lead with your heart. It feels good.
FORGIVE & LET YOURSELF OFF THE HOOK – One of my favorite quotes from Conversations With God is, “You humans keep forgetting but life is not for-getting, it’s for-giving.” Ugh.
I remember looking in the mirror a while back and I thought of someone who I was still holding on to grievances around. I said aloud, “I fucking hate you,” while I was thinking about their name, looking myself dead in the eye. In that moment I had this deep knowing that as long as I hold onto hatred, resentment, rage, anger, and fear around other people, I’m just inflicting those states of mind on myself. I literally said, “I fucking hate you,” directly to myself, thinking it was about someone else!
When I’m not forgiving someone else, I’m the one suffering. Forgiveness is not for other people, it’s for me. Forgiveness is not about letting someone else off the hook. Forgiveness is for letting myself off the hook.
FORGIVENESS TAKES THE TIME THAT IT TAKES – The solar plexus chakra rules self confidence and self acceptance, which is vital for walking through the process of forgiveness and learning in your heart chakra. I can say, “I am willing to forgive,” but that might not happen in my expected time frame. Transformation happens on the universe’s time frame. The good news is that we get to participate in this process. To participate in forgiveness, I may get to do any number of the following activities:
– engage in deep sharing and listening with trusted advisors to become more honest and aware about what’s actually going on for me
– release physical clutter in my living spaces
– get consistent about meditation (need help? one song meditation & light scan meditation)
– do service with other people and get out of my own self centeredness
– play in the ocean
GOLDEN LIGHT HEART BRIDGE VISUALIZATION – Imagine a golden light emanating from your heart to anyone else’s heart. This could be someone who has pissed you off, someone who broke up with you, someone you love very much that lives on the other side of the world, a family member who passed away, a stranger on the street, a colleague who is annoying you, or a puppy who you are just delighted about. Just imagine a golden beam of light from your heart to that being’s heart. For me, this exercise can help so much.
YOUR HEART IS NOT BROKEN – This affirmation really helped me in one of the hardest times in my life, when everything felt like it was falling apart. At that time I didn’t know that I was at the threshold of getting better. It just felt like I was dying and I wanted to die. I was so caught up in obsessive romantic turmoil and it felt like my heart was breaking all the time. I read this affirmation from Barbara Carrellas in her book Urban Tantra and carried it with me every day through that time period:
The heart cannot break. Only barriers around the heart can break.
When I’m in pain and I feel suffering, it’s not my heart breaking. I’ve just found another place in my experience where I built a wall, and today I am willing for those walls to come down. Sometimes anger and rage will come up and I recognize that those states are protecting me until I’m ready to feel sadness and grief. Keep practicing. More love, not less. You have so many tools. Use them.
With that said, this next one is SUPER important . . .
OPEN, GENTLE HEART, BIG FUCKING FENCE – That truthbomb comes from Danielle LaPorte and is with me everyday. Go read the post. I want to give love, attention, energy, and all of the gifts of my heart freely. To do that genuinely, satisfyingly, and safely, there’s gotta be some practices and protocol in my life around who gets to be in my inner circles of intimacy.
Boundaries dude. Parts of my life are a VIP party and we are not selling tickets at the gate, ya know?
What I share online, in person with acquaintances, and with varying other relationships is all enhanced by the fact that I have a real deal intentional fence around my wide, open, tender heart. Cultivate solid boundaries that keep the nonsense out, and watch the love in your heart and all parts of your life flourish.
Leah Moon
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